In any case, it's common knowledge that people desire to live in certain areas, and when they move there, they find that their neighbors are very similar to themselves. After my wife and I moved to our present house, I found that three of the other ten houses on our short street were occupied by people working at my own corporatecampus.

The study hypothesis, as the paper states, is a person–environment hypothesis in which a match between a person's personality and the characteristics of his/her neighborhood is important for life satisfaction.[4] The database was the set of 56,019 people in 216 London postal districts who participated in the BBC Big Personality Test that ran from 2009-2011.[5-6]

Western Central London was found to be the least agreeable area that had, also, the highest crime rate, the highest housing prices, and the greatest number of pedestrians. As in other studies, it was found that emotionally stable and/or extroverted people had the greatest life satisfaction no matter where they lived. Life satisfaction was high in the affluent regions of London.[5]

So, how do people cope in an environment that affords less life satisfaction? In those areas, people who were most agreeable and conscientious were better off, suggesting that personality is an important determinant for life satisfaction.[5] Some key findings,[4-5]

• A person's best place to live depends on the match between his/her dispositions and the characteristics of the neighborhood.

• The strength of the correlation between life satisfaction and personality traits depend on neighborhood characteristics; e.g., a greater openness to experience was more positively associated with life satisfaction in postal districts with greater ethnic diversity.

• In postal districts with a lower level of life satisfaction, greater agreeableness and conscientiousness in individuals were more strongly correlated with life satisfaction.

• The association between emotional stability and extroversion was not modified by neighborhood characteristics.

• Individuals with different personalties derive life satisfaction from different aspects of their environment.[4]

Says Markus Jokela, an author of this study from University of Helsinki, Finland,

"It's very common for people to talk about where is the best place to live, but most research has tended to look at factors such as income and low crime rates, and only on a very broad geographical scale, failing to consider individual differences in personality... As a result, studies imply that all people would be equally happy in the same places. It's a one-size-fits-all conclusion that, as we show, is misleading because one's level of happiness is dependent on whether their environment is suited to their personality."[5]

References:

As a speechwriter for US Vice President, Spiro Agnew, Safire created the memorable phrase, "nattering nabobs of negativism." Agnew, who was a polarizing figure in American politics at the time, was forced to resign his office on October 10, 1973, after pleading nolo contendere (no contest) to criminal charges of tax evasion, a plea deal that prevented a greater charge of accepting bribes while governor of Maryland.